The Enduring Platitude

One tallies up the monasteries they've visited, is disappointed, then ambitious and full of travel plans, and then - given gardens and prisms and Emily Dickinson poems - forgetful. It's okay, or it will be, seems to be the enduring platitude. With respect to vacations, my life has never been one that required vacating, though I do drift a lot, have a tenuous sense of "here," et cetera. All night I heard apple blossoms falling, my dreams full of them, pale white petals like discarded veils sinking through seas I myself can barely stay afloat in. Jacking off in the hayloft at six a.m., briefly intensely focused on a way her eyes have of narrowing. What is sex anyway. Later praying a rosary under the Marian apple trees, empty of whatever brings forth conflict, thriving in graces that feel human, ordinary, sufficient, okay. Going from the cemetery in Mansfield to a cemetery in Fall River, and then doubling back to 495 to drive to Cape Cod because I want to look at the ocean. When you go, hold a thought of me, that I might not live bereft in this light that endlessly spills in me knowing you, once upon a time.